Massimiliano Gallo, the Neapolitan actor who reached cinema at 41 and now wants to direct it

Massimiliano Gallo

Photo: Comune di Napoli / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	June 19, 1968 Naples, Italy
Occupation	Actor and director
Known for	The Hand of God, Loose Cannons, Pinocchio
Awards	Premio Kineo · La pellicola d'oro

Millions of Italians know Massimiliano Gallo as a man who apologises for a living: the patient, ironic husband of a prosecutor in Imma Tataranni, the Salerno lawyer who loses cases because he cannot bring himself to take sides in Vincenzo Malinconico, avvocato d’insuccesso. Not long ago he told the Italian press that he would not go back to the husband. The reason was a small film about Eduardo De Filippo and a group of young inmates on the island of Nisida, which he wrote, produced and directed himself. It stayed in cinemas for almost five weeks, which he called a small miracle. For an actor with a television audience in the millions, the phrase measures the distance he chose to travel.

Gallo grew up inside the trade. His father, Nunzio Gallo, was one of the great voices of Neapolitan song, a Sanremo winner with “Corde della mia chitarra” in a pairing with Claudio Villa, and the man who took that song to the second Eurovision Song Contest. His mother, the actress Bianca Maria Varriale, ran a company for child performers, and her youngest son was on its stage at five and in Rai children’s films before ten. His older brother, Gianfranco, also became an actor.

The boy, born in Naples on 19 June 1968, later abandoned a literature degree after seven exams. He trained in the company of Carlo Croccolo, Totò’s old screen partner and a friend of the family, who prepared him for the entrance selection of the Piccolo Teatro di Milano; Gallo passed the first round and failed the second. In 1988 he and Gianfranco founded the Compagnia Gallo. The door that mattered opened in 1997, when Carlo Giuffrè cast him as Mario Bertolini, the part Peppino De Filippo had created, in Eduardo’s Non ti pago. Nennillo in Natale in casa Cupiello followed.

Cinema arrived late, and it arrived with a gun. Marco Risi cast him as the Camorra boss Valentino Gionta in Fortapàsc, the film about the murdered Neapolitan journalist Giancarlo Siani, released in 2009. Gallo was 41. “In these twelve years I had to catch up making thirty-five films and fifteen series,” he later told Sorrisi e Canzoni TV. “I ran a lot.” The running took him to Ferzan Özpetek’s Loose Cannons as Salvatore, the brother-in-law from Naples, and to the Crow in Matteo Garrone’s Pinocchio. In Mario Martone’s The Mayor of Rione Sanità, another Eduardo text, he played Arturo Santaniello, the baker whose own son wants him dead.

Television turned the late start into ubiquity. As commissario Luigi Palma in I bastardi di Pizzofalcone he ran a police station nobody else wanted to command. As Pietro De Ruggeri in Imma Tataranni he spent five seasons in Matera as the gentle counterweight to Vanessa Scalera’s abrasive magistrate. Then Rai 1 gave him a series of his own. Vincenzo Malinconico, avvocato d’insuccesso, from Diego De Silva’s novels, made him the lead for the first time: a divorced lawyer who takes cases beyond his means and consults an imaginary friend dressed as a 1980s music presenter. The role brought him the Pellicola d’oro for best actor.

Cinema kept calling alongside it. Paolo Sorrentino cast him as Franco in The Hand of God. Alessandro Gassmann gave him the lead in Il silenzio grande, as Valerio Primic, a celebrated Neapolitan writer gone quiet who fails to notice his family sliding into poverty until his son blames him for a ruined life. The closest fit between actor and material came with three Rai films drawn from Eduardo’s comedies, Filumena Marturano, Napoli milionaria! and Questi fantasmi!. The last, directed by Gassmann, earned him the Premio Kineo for best lead actor during the 2025 Venice Film Festival.

La salita is the film that ties those threads together. It is set in the early 1980s, when women prisoners were moved to the male juvenile prison on Nisida after bradyseism damaged their jail in Pozzuoli, and when Eduardo De Filippo was helping to build a theatre school on the island. Mariano Rigillo plays Eduardo, Enzo Avitabile wrote the score, and Gallo co-wrote the script with Riccardo Brun and Mara Fondacaro. Gallo insists the story is inspired by real events, not a documentary. The film premiered in the Giornate degli Autori at Venice in 2025 and reached Italian cinemas through Fandango on 9 April 2026.

Its reception is where the easy version of Gallo’s story stops working. The run of decent, mild men on Rai 1 has made him one of the most trusted faces in Italian prime time, and he knows how fragile that trust is: people ask him for selfies because he is on television, he once said, and if he stopped for a few years nobody but his real fans would recognise him. La salita tested that directly. It earned three Nastri d’Argento nominations, for best debut, screenplay and score, and lost the debut prize to Damiano Michieletto’s Primavera; the special Nastro connected to the film went to Rigillo for his Eduardo. The television audience did not simply convert into ticket buyers, and five weeks in theatres say as much about the limits of a prime-time name as about the state of Italian distribution.

He has kept moving regardless. Through summer 2026 he was in Salerno shooting the third season of Vincenzo Malinconico, avvocato d’insuccesso, now directed by Cosimo Gomez with the original cast. On 22 September Netflix released Minerva Academy, an eight-episode series from Mare Fuori director Ivan Silvestrini set in a military school modelled on Naples’ Nunziatella, in which he plays the commander Achille Giordano, whose own son is among the recruits. He also plays Gigi D’Alessio’s father-in-law in Luca Miniero’s biopic Solo se canti tu, with Matteo Paolillo as the young singer, and his stage work now includes Lettera a Eduardo.

Gallo has spoken openly about going into analysis over an anger he carried towards his father, the television star he watched grow old at home. Nunzio Gallo died in 2008, before his son’s breakthrough on screen. Gallo has a daughter, Giulia, from his first marriage, and in December 2022 he married the Brazilian actress Shalana Santana, who appears in La salita; their daughter Artemisia was born in 2024.

The next step is already on paper. Gallo is writing his second feature as director, a remake of a classic commedia all’italiana whose title he has not revealed, hoping to shoot next summer, possibly partly in Basilicata, the region where he spent seven years as Pietro De Ruggeri. Imma’s husband will not come back to Matera. The man who played him might, this time standing behind the camera.

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